Irish literature and the historiography of 18th-century Ireland

Vincent Morley

There is an Irish proverb that runs ‘a scéal féin scéal gach aon duine’; literally, ‘everyone’sstory is their own story’, or more loosely, ‘everyone likes to be talking about themselves’. Inkeeping with this piece of folk wisdom, I’d like to begin tonight’s lecture by taking a fewminutes to talk about my own initiation into the use of the vernacular literature as ahistorical source.

Figure 1: Hugh MacCurtin, A Brief Discourse in Vindication of the Antiquity of Ireland (Dublin, 1717)

Some twenty-eight years ago, in 1991, I was researching a thesis for the degree ofM.Phil. in Irish studies in UCD. My thesis was originally conceived as a study of HughMacCurtin’s Brief Discourse in Vindication of the Antiquity of Ireland, a history based onnative sources that was published at Dublin in 1717. I wanted to include an introductorychapter on the author, who was also a prolific poet and is perhaps better known under theIrish form of his name, Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín. In trying to piece together a summarybiography, I encountered a number of problems, one of which is of relevance to the subjectof tonight’s lecture. In one of his poem’s, MacCurtin anticipated forthcoming Christmasfestivities among the soldiers of the Régiment de Clare – an Irish regiment in the Frenchservice. The poem strongly suggests, but does not explicitly state, that the poet was himselfa soldier in the regiment. The final verse reads as follows:

Figure 2: NUIM MS. Murphy 11, pages 268 (line 1) and 269 (lines 2-4)

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That is:

Is dóigh má ghabhaimse an cóta dearg so leo go rachad tar sáile,a scóda leathan, a seolta scartha is an sról ’na mbratachaibh arda;cóir ná ceannach ní gheobhaid ó Ghallaibh go dtógaid sealbh a n-áitreabh,Is Seoirse a thachtadh le corda casta is is ceolmhar screadfas an chláirseach.

(I suppose if I put on this red coat, I’ll go with them over the sea, with sheets spread,sails deployed and silk in their banners on high; no justice or recompense will theyobtain from the English til they take possession of their dwellings and strangleGeorge [II] with a twisted rope, and musically the harp will sound.)

As with any work of literature, it is possible that the author may have given free rein to hisimagination: if a poet chooses to speak in the voice of a soldier, it cannot be assumed thathe really was a soldier. In any event, it may be noted that the crucial phrase in the poem isqualified: ‘má ghabhaimse an cóta dearg so’ (‘if I put on this red coat’). This leaves open thepossibility that the poet never put on a red coat. Yet precisely such a claim occurs in one ofthe manuscript copies (RIA 23 C 8) where the scribe’s introduction reads as follows: ‘Aodhabaoi mc Cruitín cct ⁊ é a bhflóndras, a ccaith thighearna an chláir ⁊ súil aco re teacht gohéirinn do bhain a bhfearann dúthchais do ghallaibh isan mbliain 1693’ [‘Aodh Buí MacCruitín composed when he was in Flanders, in Lord Clare’s regiment, and they hoping tocome to Ireland to take their native land from the English in the year 1693’]. My confidencein this scribal note was somewhat impaired by the date quoted: the king of England was notcalled ‘George’ in 1693. Furthermore, from other evidence, I knew that the poet was borncirca 1680 and could hardly have enlisted at twelve or thirteen years of age. None the less,my feeling was that the poem had an authentic ring to it and that the poet really had put onthe red coat of a soldier. With the energy and enthusiasm of youth, I concluded that therewas only one course of action open to me: rather than leave such an important biographicalquestion unresolved, I decided to visit the French military archives—then, as now, located inthe Chateau de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. On the second day of my research there,I found what I was looking for: the muster roll of the Régiment de Clare.

Figure 3: Service historique de la Défense MS. 1Yc 257, folio 114 verso

This established that MacCurtin enlisted on 12 October 1728 and was discharged on 20August 1729 - information that was consistent with other biographical details that wereknown to me. For example, MacCurtin had already published a book entitled The Elementsof the Irish Language Grammatically Explained in English at Louvain in 1728, and he wouldsubsequently be named as a collaborator on the title page of Conchobhar Ó Beaglaoich’sThe English Irish Dictionary which appeared at Paris in 1732.

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Figure 4: Conchobhar Ó Beaglaoich, The English Irish Dictionary (Paris, 1732)

Furthermore, the soldier in the muster role was aged 48 years – exceptionally old for anenlisted man, but exactly what I expected for the poet. As final confirmation of the soldier’sidentity, I was able to establish that in 1728 the Régiment de Clare was stationed at the townof Béthune in the province of Artois, about midway between Louvain and Paris. Tosummarise: an entry made by anonymous officers in a muster roll in 1728-9, hadtransformed a literary composition of questionable evidential value into a unique historicaltext composed by a rank-and-file Irish soldier in the French service. This was a formativeexperience for me, and it left me with an enduring belief that the vernacular literatureprovides a window into the views and lives of important social strata that are not otherwiserepresented in the historical record

This belief places me in a small minority among historians of eighteenth-centuryIreland. Almost invariably, historians of the period restrict their research to sources inEnglish and avoid any engagement with the vernacular literature. Yet Irish-language textsfrom the century are both extensive and varied. While only 500 manuscripts in the languagehave survived from before 1700, about 1,000 manuscripts are extant from the eighteenthcentury, many of them running to hundreds of pages. There are a further 3,000 manuscriptsfrom the first half of the nineteenth century, many of which contain texts composed duringthe previous century. These manuscripts provide a unique insight into the culture of thesociety in which they were produced—a more sensitive insight than could ever have beenprovided by printed sources, because the barriers to manuscript production were so muchlower. Essentially, manuscript production required only literacy, some paper, a bottle of inkand a goose quill. There was no need to engage a printer, to solicit subscriptions, or toarrange for distribution. Furthermore, while publications in English were monitored by thestate, and their authors, printers, distributors and retailers were all liable to prosecution forseditious libel, it was comparatively easy for Irish-language authors and the scribes whorecorded their work to evade detection. The vernacular sources are therefore much moreunguarded than sources in English on such sensitive issues as the legitimacy of the reigningdynasty, the orthodoxy of the established church, or Ireland’s constitutional status. Althoughthere were some instances of Irish-language authors being prosecuted, a small amount ofdiscretion ensured that the risk was low and, for practical purposes, vernacular compositions

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of the period can be regarded as uncensored expressions of their authors’ opinions. It maybe noted, however, that the scribe who penned the copy of MacCurtin’s poem in NUIM MS.Murphy 11 took the precaution of abbreviating the potentially incriminating words‘Gallaibh’ and ‘Seoirse’.

Figure 5: Two examples of scribal discretion in NUIM MS. Murphy 11

More than a century ago, Eoin MacNeill, the distinguished historian of early Ireland,surveyed the contents of the O’Laverty manuscript collection held in Saint Malachy’sCollege, Belfast. This collection contained 333 discrete compositions, and MacNeill classifiedthem as follows: eighty-five items (26 %) were religious and a further seven were ‘purelycontroversial’, a description which probably signified sectarian polemics; 38 items (13 %)were heroic in nature and mainly concerned tales of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his fianna;seventeen items (5 %) related to ‘contemporary politics’, and a further sixteen dealt with‘past history’; twenty-six compositions were described as ‘amorous’, some of which MacNeilljudged to be ‘indecent’; ‘humorous literature’ was represented by eighteen compositionsand a further eleven were described as ‘satirical’; twenty items praised persons who wererecently deceased, and seven were composed in honour of living subjects.

Figure 6: Eoin MacNeill's analysis of literary texts in the O'Laverty manuscripts

MacNeill’s sample was small and a northern bias is likely, given the provenance of themanuscripts, but I cannot cite a more recent or representative analysis of the manuscriptliterature as, remarkably, the subject has not attracted the attention of later historians.

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One must pose the question: why is this so? If the divide between the Irish-speakingand English-speaking communities in the eighteenth century were merely geographic—similar to that between the French-speaking and German-speaking cantons of Switzerland—historians’ neglect of the Irish sources would still be difficult to understand given the largevolume and broad range of the material available. But the divide between the linguisticcommunities in Ireland was not merely regional: in 18th-century Ireland, the linguisticdivision correlated strongly with important ethnic, political, religious and social divisions.Historians who restrict their research to sources in English, systematically privilege voicesthat are overwhelmingly English or Anglo-Irish, Protestant, loyal to the established politicalorder, and drawn from the upper layers of society. To follow such an unbalanced researchmethodology is to engage in the retrospective anglicisation of eighteenth-century Ireland. Itis to fabricate an image of an English-speaking Georgian Ireland that never existed in reality:the age of Swift and Goldsmith was also the age of Ó Rathaille and Merriman. On the otherhand, to adopt a bilingual research methodology, is to engage with the views of the ruralpopulace, of Catholics, of the politically disaffected, of social layers that had no access toprint media. Given this background, then, why do historians of the period consistently fail toutilise the Irish sources? In the next part of this lecture I would like to interrogate variousexplanations that have been offered by academic historians.

Figure 7: Two books by R. B. McDowell from 1944 and 1997

Comments by R. B. McDowell in the preface to his Irish Public Opinion 1750-1800, amuch praised monograph published in 1944, give some insight into the views of historians atthat time. Dated though they are, McDowell’s arguments provide a benchmark againstwhich the views of more recent historians can be assessed. The author anticipated somecriticism of his failure to use sources in Irish, and defended his exclusively anglophonemethodology in the following terms:

It may be said that too much attention has been paid to the opinions of ‘the thinking few’ (to borrow an expression from theological controversy) and that the outlook of the masses has been neglected. But perhaps it scarcely requires to be emphasized that the great bulk of the people were restricted by poverty and persecution to political speculations of the simplest kind ... the great output of Gaelic

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poetry through which they expressed their feelings does not contain any formulated political ideas.

Irish Public Opinion 1750-1800 (1944), pp. 5-6.

This is an extraordinary claim. In effect, McDowell dismissed the political and historicalsignificance of the views held by the majority of the Irish population on such subjects as theAmerican revolution, the Volunteer movement, the Rightboy agitation against tithes, Penallegislation, and the French revolution. Furthermore, he did so without ever examining thesources in which those views were expressed. In a second book, Crisis and Decline: The Fateof Southern Unionists, published as recently as 1997, McDowell was equally dismissive of theIrish-language sources:

Within Trinity the courses and teaching closely resembled those in a British university—I nearly wrote, ‘in other British universities’. However, there was a school of Celtic studies and courses in Irish, and the comparatively few undergraduates who studied Irish were prone to assert vigorously the immense value, especially to Irishmen, of their own subject. Their assertions left me cold or, on controversial occasions, heated. I felt no impulse to learn Irish. My ancestral connections with the language, ifthey existed, were very distant; I was not a good linguist and my slight acquaintance with Gaelic literature, gained from translation, did not stimulate me to attempt to master the language.

Crisis and Decline: The Fate of Southern Unionists (1997), pp. 205-6.

Once again, this is an extraordinary argument. As professional scholars, historians should beable to transcend their family backgrounds, their political sympathies and their personalaptitudes. For any historian, the need to familiarise oneself with the full range of sourcesrelevant to the subject being investigated should be paramount. Instead, McDowelldismissed, unread, all of the sources produced by one of the two linguistic communities ineighteenth-century Ireland. His monograph was mistitled: in reality, the subject of his studywas not Irish opinion, but rather Anglo-Irish opinion.

Figure 8: S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660-1760 (1992)

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Although his academic career spanned more than fifty years, it must beacknowledged that R. B. McDowell’s views were formed in the 1940s and it might bethought that attitudes would have evolved in the intervening period. This is true to someextent, but arguments that minimise the importance of sources in Irish continue to beadvanced. Professor S. J. Connolly, who recently retired from the chair of Irish history atQueens University Belfast, is prominent among those who dispute the historical value ofvernacular sources. In his Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660-1760, a work that was well received on its appearance in 1992, he argued that thevernacular literature of the later eighteenth century expressed ‘fossilized’ ideas that ‘shouldperhaps be considered part of a society’s folklore rather than its politics’. However, the onlyevidence advanced in support of this contention was a song entitled ‘Tá an cruatan arSheoirse’ (‘George is in distress’) composed by the County Kerry poet Eoghan Rua ÓSúilleabháin during the American revolutionary war. Professor Connolly dismissed ÓSúilleabháin’s song in the following terms:

When the County Kerry labourer Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (1748-84) composed a poem on the American War of Independence, for example, his delight in the difficulties engulfing the Hanoverian dynasty was conveyed in a web of confused and inconsistent images, in which the American colonists were not mentioned at all, while ‘the Emperor’ was somehow imagined to be among Britain’s enemies.Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660-1760 (1992), p. 248.

The truth is very different. In reality, it was the historian, not the poet, who showed a lack offamiliarity with the contemporary diplomatic and military contexts. The entry of France intothe American war coincided with growing tensions between Austria, a French ally since the‘diplomatic revolution’ of 1756, and Prussia. These tensions culminated in the War ofBavarian Succession in 1778-9. In Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, it was widely expectedthat the two wars – that between France and Britain in the Atlantic, and that betweenAustria and Prussia in Germany – would merge into a wider conflict, much as the colonialWar of Jenkins’ Ear had previously merged with the War of Austrian Succession. In April1778, shortly after the formal breach between Britain and France, Finn’s Leinster Journalreported that French forces had entered Brussels, capital of the Austrian Netherlands, andcontinued:

we foresaw this might take place in consequence of a convention between the courtsof Vienna and Versaille, according to which the French were to occupy the Austrian Netherlands as soon as the Emperor’s troops had retired from them.

Finn’s Leinster Journal, 8 April 1778.

In its next issue, the newspaper advised its readers that George III’s continental possessionswere about to be overrun: ‘The Emperor is putting himself at the head of his army ... andBrunswick and Hanover are certainly to be the seat of war’. That Britain did not becomeinvolved in a German war can be attributed to two factors: first, the French were determinednot to fight on two fronts; second, Russian opposition to Austrian claims in Bavariapersuaded the emperor to bring the war to an early conclusion. The War of BavarianSuccession is now a minor historical footnote, but at the time it was widely assumed that itwould develop into a general European war involving all the major powers. Austria’saccession to the anti-British alliance was not only anticipated, but was reported as anaccomplished fact in the Irish press. Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin’s song accurately reflects this

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expectation. Further references in the song to Comte d’Estaing, the French navalcommander, and to Russian rejection of British overtures, show the poet to have been a wellinformed observer of contemporary European developments. His song captures the sense ofanticipation which spread among the Irish-speaking population of Munster in the earlysummer of 1778 as the French fleet put to sea, as Germany teetered on the brink of war,and as British hopes of a Russian alliance foundered. Far from being ‘confused andinconsistent’, the song is an essential text for any historian who would trace the evolution ofIrish opinion during the American revolution.

Writing in the American Historical Review in 1999, Jane Ohlmeyer, currently professorof modern history in TCD, put forward a different argument. Unlike McDowell and Connolly,she did not dismiss the historical value of sources in Irish. Instead, she argued that theavailability of English translations made a knowledge of the language unnecessary:

For many, the linguistic barrier remains a very real one; however, given the wealth of material that has been translated into English by bodies like the Irish Texts Society, it should not be an insurmountable one.

American Historical Review, April 1999, p. 450.

This argument is simply untenable. The greater part, by far, of the vernacular literature ofthe eighteenth century has never been published in Irish—much less translated into English.It is preserved in manuscript only; those who would read it require a knowledge not just ofthe Irish language but also of Irish palaeography. The minuscule proportion of materialavailable in English can be gauged by considering the number of eighteenth-century poets,anthologies of whose work have been published without translations. In contrast, I can thinkof just one prolific poet from the eighteenth century whose corpus is available in translation:namely, Aogán Ó Rathaille.

Figure 9: Single-author anthologies of 18th-century verse in Irish only (on left) and with English translations (on right)

There are, of course, many individual poems and songs that have been translated, but theseare invariably chosen for their literary merit, not for their historical value, and there may bean inverse correlation between the two: good literature usually concerns itself with

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universal, timeless themes, whereas important primary sources are invariably situated in aparticular historical conjuncture. In fairness to Professor Ohlmeyer, her period is theseventeenth century rather than the eighteenth, and translations from the earlier period aresomewhat more plentiful. None the less, when two members of the Irish department in TCD(Damian McManus and Eoghan Ó Raghallaigh) edited an anthology of five hundredpreviously unpublished bardic poems in 2010, their collection included approximately onehundred and fifty poems from the 17th century and none of these were translated.

Figure 10: The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-century Ireland was reviewed in History Ireland, July-August 2017

In his review of my Popular Mind in Eighteenth-century Ireland, a review whichappeared in the July 2017 issue of History Ireland, Jim Smyth, emeritus professor of Irishhistory at the University of Notre Dame, concluded as follows:

The high value of Irish-language sources is demonstrated conclusively. The tractability of such evidence remains problematic, however. To what extent did poetswrite for each other? How representative were their views? Imagine, by analogy, extrapolating later twentieth-century popular political beliefs from those encoded in a stylised literary genre of that era—academic history?

History Ireland, July-August 2017, p. 63.

While apparently conceding the importance of the vernacular sources, Smyth questionswhether the views they express were really representative of the wider Irish-speakingcommunity. He sees a parallel between the Irish-language authors of the eighteenth centuryand academic historians of the present day. The latter are, of course, a veryunrepresentative group. Recruited largely from the upper middle class, they are subjected tointensive instruction for three to four years as undergraduates, followed by practical trainingfor four to six years as they research master’s and doctoral theses. This allows ampleopportunity for the historical profession to reproduce itself in its own image: to guide younghistorians into approved areas of research, to familiarise them with the conventionalwisdom of their elders, and to advise them which sources are essential and which sourcesare merely optional – or, indeed, deprecated. Given such a long process of formation, it maywell be possible to inculcate a professional viewpoint which differs from that of the widersociety. Whether this is true or not, it has no bearing on the literature of eighteenth-century

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Ireland. The authors of that period were all amateurs and they received no professionaltraining. Furthermore, they were socially differentiated and widely dispersed geographically.For example, it seems likely that songs from Munster had little or no currency in NorthLeinster or Ulster, and the reverse also seems to be true. While some poets of the periodundoubtedly received payments for individual compositions, none of them were employedby patrons. The comparison drawn between their circumstances and that of modernacademic historians is therefore devoid of merit and can be dismissed out of hand. Thevernacular authors of the eighteenth-century were recruited from, and composed for, theIrish-speaking population at large.

Figure 11: Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of Ireland (Cambridge, 2018)

In his preface to the third volume of the Cambridge History of Ireland whichappeared last year (2018), Professor James Kelly of DCU commented as follows:

It is fashionable, in certain circles, to argue that the limits of this [state] archive can be made good by appealing to the corpus of Irish-language material, and recent workutilising its primary component – Gaelic poetry – has demonstrated its potential in divining the popular mind, but it has less to offer on economic, social, gender, intellectual, recreational and other aspects of Irish society with which historians also seek to engage and, inter alia, address here.

The Cambridge History of Ireland, III (2018), p. 14.

I suspect that Professor Kelly may be correct in relation to economic history, provided this isnarrowly defined as trade statistics, availability of specie, fluctuations of wages and prices,etc. But I am baffled as to why he imagines that sources in Irish are unimportant for thosewho would investigate social, gender, intellectual or recreational aspects of the Irish past. Inrelation to social history, the vernacular sources shed essential light on such key topics aspenal legislation, landlordism and agrarian unrest. In relation to gender history, let us recallthat Eoin MacNeill described twenty-six of the 333 compositions in the O’Lavertymanuscripts—some 8 per cent of the total—as ‘amorous’ or ‘indecent’. Can it seriously bemaintained that such works have nothing to tell us about gender relations at the time oftheir composition? Again, the long series of poems by multiple authors on the cross-dressingSeon Anna Prior are surely of relevance to any historian of gender fluidity in the eighteenth-

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century. Kelly’s inclusion of intellectual history among the areas where the Irish sources havelittle to offer is more perplexing still because, in the very first chapter of volume 3 of theCambridge History, literary compositions in Irish are the principal source used tocharacterise the ideology of Irish Jacobitism. I am the author of that chapter and ProfessorKelly commissioned me to write it. Strangest of all is the inclusion of recreation among theareas in which the vernacular sources are found wanting. It should surely be evident thateighteenth-century texts in Irish are vital sources for the literary culture of the period; theyalso shed incidental light on such topics as music and song, storytelling, dancing, cardgames, alcohol consumption, etc. I would have thought that even those who dispute theimportance of the Irish sources for the political historian, would at least accept theirimportance for the historian of popular culture.

Figure 12: Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662-2016 (2019)

A collection of essays entitled Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662-2016,was published earlier this year. One of the editors, Patrick Walsh, is a lecturer in history atTCD and he quoted a taxation-related passage from a poem by the County Sligo author SeánÓ Gadhra that was translated in my Popular Mind in Eighteenth-century Ireland. He thenadded the following comment:

Such commentaries on taxation in the Irish language sources are rare, making this an especially valuable source, revealing as it does some insight into popular attitudes to taxation, attitudes that were rarely verbalised in the surviving documentation. Instead historians have been largely obliged to infer popular attitudes to taxation from instances of illicit distillation, protest, riot, or smuggling.

Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662-2016 (2019), p. 90.

I have now almost thirty years experience of working on the literature of the eighteenth-century, and it does not appear to me that the vernacular authors of the period wereparticularly reticent on the subject of taxation. On the contrary, it seems to me thatreferences to the subject are quite plentiful. In addition to the term that is now standard,‘cáin’, the terms for taxation used in the literature include ‘cíos’, which can also mean ‘rent’;‘ráta’, which is often a land tax; ‘sraith’, which corresponds to ‘cess’ in English; ‘deachú’, thetithes payable to the established church; and the generic ‘íoc’ or ‘payment’. Furthermore,

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the word ‘tax’ is itself used as a borrowing from English; indeed, it must be one of the mostcommon English words in the Irish-language literature of the period. But if references totaxation are common, it probably is the case that they have rarely been translated. This iseasily explained: the dry-as-dust subject of taxation is unlikely to arouse the interest ofliterary scholars, while historians typically avoid any engagement with the Irish manuscripts.

As the views of the six historians quoted above show, there has been some shift inattitudes. While there is a clear line of continuity between R. B. McDowell’s claim that theIrish sources do ‘not contain any formulated political ideas’, and S. J. Connolly’s argumentthat the ideas they contain should be considered ‘part of a society’s folklore rather than itspolitics’, more recent comments by other historians have been less dismissive. None theless, they continue to minimise the significance of the Irish sources by arguing that much ofthe material has been translated, that the views they express are unrepresentative, or thatthey have little to contribute in specific areas. Varied though these arguments are, they allpoint to the same conclusion: that a purely anglophone research methodology is perfectlyadequate for historians of eighteenth-century Ireland. In this, they diverge from thestandard practice of historians in other countries.

Figure 13: Books by Michael Stanford (1994) and Michael Howard (1991)

Let me quote from a popular textbook on historical methods, Michael Stanford’s ACompanion to the Study of History (1994):

Languages ... act as a filter for the evidence. Any historian of Europe needs to be ableto read several languages. Indeed, it is often necessary even for one’s own country. The history of the port of Bristol (a modest piece of local history, one might suppose) calls for, at least, English, French, Latin and Spanish.

A Companion to the Study of History (1994), p. 150.

Another English author, the distinguished military historian Michael Howard, has written asfollows in The Lessons of History (1991):

we cannot know too many languages. We need them not so much in order to make ourselves understood but in order to understand. Without knowing the languages that shape and express their thought, our comprehension of other cultural

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communities will be dim and unreliable, however great in the abstract may be our knowledge of their past.

The Lessons of History (1991), pp. 12-13.

Howard and Stanford are surely correct. The historian of eighteenth-century Ireland needsto be bilingual because Irish society of the period was bilingual and the primary sources ithas left to posterity are written in two languages.

A monolingual historian who approaches the history of eighteenth-century Ireland,can be likened to a profoundly deaf film critic. Such a critic could give detailed descriptionsof the sets, costumes, lighting and make-up, and provide a reasonably accurate account ofwho did what to whom, when, where and how. But a deaf movie critic would be reduced tospeculation when trying to answer the most important question of all: ‘why’? If we cannotunderstand the dialogue, if we cannot hear the characters speaking, their motivations mustremain obscure to us. As if to confirm this view, academic historians of eighteenth-centuryIreland have seriously maintained: that we cannot know how plebeian Catholics felt aboutthe Penal laws; that Jacobite sentiment dissipated quickly after Culloden; that the Whiteboysof the 1760s were loyal to George III; that the Catholic population supported the British wareffort during the American revolution. None of these propositions will survive engagementwith the Irish sources.

A profoundly deaf movie critic would have a second handicap that should also bementioned: such a critic would be unable to hear the soundtrack which is so important forcreating a mood or an atmosphere: whether it be one of tension or calm, of grief or joy, offear or expectation. Societies also have soundtracks, soundtracks that manipulate theemotions of their populations. The soundtrack we hear today is provided, in large part, bythe mass media – whether it be the legacy ‘mainstream media’ or newer digital media. Butin eighteenth-century Ireland, the soundtrack heard by the majority of the people consistedof song and verse in Irish. While much of this material has been lost, a considerableproportion of it is preserved in the literary manuscripts. Familiarity with this soundtrack isnot an optional extra for historians of the eighteenth-century; it is an essential requirementwithout which their understanding of Irish society during the period must remain, in MichaelHoward’s words, ‘dim and unreliable’.

The above lecture was read to the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland on 26 September 2019. Figure 6 has been added since.

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